So back in April, I got a really nice email from Shane Luitjens over at Air Train GO! Magazine to do some work. I was asked to illustrate a story about a writer who goes off to survival school and then spends a week alone in the everglades. Hell Yeah right?!?!

My first set of sketches focused on the transition from society into nature. The brief I got in the beginning was that the writer spent a night at a fancy hotel before going into the wild. I say brief because the story was being written as I was making sketches for the article. As the story got fleshed out, the art direction was to pull the distance of the viewer farther and farther away. This is to show a kind of creepy, all alone mood in the piece. This in turn made for a piece that is very different from what I normally do. It’s almost wall papery. I love it.

The fun isn’t over! I was also asked to do 2 spots to follow the article as well that focused on emotions more that anything else. In the end, Shane choose one of the conceptual portraits and suggested I draw a compass and somehow illustrate the idea of being lost. This is also the first set of spot I’ve ever illustrated. Even in art school I never had to draw spots!

I finished out a second portrait for Shane to choose from, since it doesn’t really take me a long to paint a piece of art. I didn’t know which portrait made it to print till I saw it published. It was a good surprise.